Author: CONTACT Software

Let’s get digital – The Internet of Things (IoT) has an outstanding influence on the relationship between companies and their customers. Companies now face the challenge of placing attractive digital offerings so as not to fall behind. The white paper identifies the central mechanisms of digital offerings and identifies the 14 most important patterns and blueprints for IoT-driven business models.

Market pressure and a new terrain. The markets are becoming digital and smart. Hardly any industry or offer that is not networked and/or in the cloud – at least that’s how it seems. This is undoubtedly a trend that is massively promoted by market-determining players, especially from Silicon Valley. Today, we are all influenced by the use of smartphones and home automation solutions, and we transfer corresponding expectations to other areas as well. The question of “whether” no longer arises, but rather of “how”. According to McKinsey the sales potential for digitized products in the B2B environment is even twice as high as in the B2C sector! Certainly, some phenomena on the market can be accepted as hypes. However, it is also certain that concrete developments and sometimes existential challenges also arise in supposedly firmly established markets:

Innovative and established competitors place an offer as “first mover”, attracting attention to themselves from customers for whom digitisation is not yet an issue.

New players are breaking into existing markets and placing previously unknown offers on the basis of digitized services.

Previously specialized providers (non-providers or providers of secondary services) are expanding their offerings digitally and thus attacking providers in the core market.

The Internet of Things (“IoT”) as a vehicle for digitized product offerings is virtually universal and knows no industry or process boundaries. According to Gartner, this is reflected in “ambitious IoT plans” in a wide variety of industries. Many companies are therefore being forced to confront the potential erosion of their markets by new suppliers.

The challenge lies not only in the high market dynamics, but also in the technical and sales challenges in a partly unknown territory. Many, especially medium-sized companies, lack software know-how, especially if it goes beyond the embedded area. In particular, this includes networked and distributed product architectures or analytics.

Another complicating factor is the fact that suitable personnel is not actually available on the market today. In addition, it is not only about recruiting new employees, but also about building up new business areas. In order to be able to act, companies must invest in completely new alliances and partner models.

The following white paper focuses on the second area of customer service improvement and uses the term “IoT”. The analysis of IoT projects shows that the majority of projects are based on the expansion of a market position in existing markets, i. e. the expansion of the existing product range. Only a few companies approach new markets. In other words, companies generally take a very cautious approach to new business options and try to avoid risks.